◆ SpookStack

APRIL 14,1947 the range of 4 young woman perfectly normal except for a scrupulous con- science and a vivid imagination. Fran- Goise is left, after her husband’s death at sea, to the almost exclusive company of his fanatically devoted mother and to. the enforced occupation of morbid remi- niscence. The old lady becomes obsessed with the idea that her son is stifl alive and tries to impose this faith on her daughter-in-law. In rejecting it, Fran- Goise is forced to admit that she doesn't want her husband to be alive and upon the guilt of her unfaithfulness depends the motivation of the story. Ts Is THE YEAR (Doubleday, $3) contains detailed maps, a prose- poetic prelude and postlude and a. glossary. The author, Feike Feikema, has remained faithful to all available data on the weather every day from 1918 to 1936 in the western Iowa prai- rié land which is the setting of his novel. He has studied the dialects, habits, amusements and traditions of the people he writes about, and even attests to an exact veracity on rocks, weeds and trees. All this:supports, even ihtensifies, | the simplicity of the theme: mari‘agkinst hature, a particular farmer’s ' boastful and hazardous life in subduing the soil and the elements for his use arid his gloty. As is usual in these agricultural epics, the soil and the elements win’ at least an esthetic victory, for the tradi- tion of the garrulously taciturn yokel- hero has become formalized by now, and the reader’s attitude to him de- pends on a sympathetic response to that tradition. Whatever his response, he will admit that This Is the Year is a large, expansive, pretentious and sincere novel. ERMANN Kesten’s Happy Man H (Wyn, $3), now published for the first time in America, has been trans- lated into fourteen languages and en- joys a substantial reputation in German literature between the world wars. It is the story of Max Blattner and his fiancée, Else, who- represent Berlin’s bankrupt middle class—physically and emotionally exhausted, “holding life to be a misfortune.” Max has no money and no job and in the panic of despera- tion continually muffs his chances to se- ‘cure one. Else has been pledged by her father to a. prosperous marriage, as a last resort to save the family from accu- mulated debt and threatened disgrace. These circumstances propel them through the bizarre after-dark plot which decides their fates. The crux of the story is in the open- ing fines: “ “But we could still kill our- selves,’ she said. He was becoming: im- patient. He couldn’t stand much more of this sort of talk.” Else is young and logical and sentimental. Since her life - is so devoid of everything but Max’s affection that she has exchanged all lift for his love, there'is nothing left to do with her lover but to die with him. Max, however, is another case...In the poverty of his life, he was sheltered under Else’s love, but when her affection threatens to overwhelm him, he refuses to follow her into tragedy and shrewdly abandons her. For Max’s ambition is not to give himself to the wheels of an express train, but to become the Happy Man, the anonymous bourgeois hero of a conventional success. By his ennui, his poverty, his envy of money; he is forced ‘temporarily ‘into an apparently-oppdsing ‘role; -as_ the ‘self-announced “and: self- pitied victim of society, he supports | the shabby dignity of the anarchist hero. But as soon as he can escape this anomalous ‘position he entrenches him- Illustration by George Groez from Happy Man Angeles. : 35 — self in the wisdom of his own dictum. that “unhappiness is a flaw in a man’s character.” The novel is superbly illustrated by George Grosz; the text and the pictures are so complementary that one feels that if the writer and the artist had ex- changed mediums they would have pro- duced the same volume. ‘ H ALF the stories in Sylvia Townsend Warnet’s The Museum of Cheats (Viking, $2.50) appeared in the New Yorker during the last four years, and -all are superior examples of that genre, Some of them are about English civilian life during the war; some are exercises . in fantasy. Miss Warner writes with grace (which sometimes becomes cute), with a vitality (occasionally boisterous), an irony (just curdling into sarcasm), but her very real skill usually manages to balance these qualities and she is never boring. JOHN FARRELLY Crime and Punishment Deadline, by Alexander. Irving - (Dodd, Mead, $2.50), is a fairly neat item dealing with the murder of a young and beautiful advertising copy- writer in Westchester County’s most conservative department store. Person- alities are cleverly played off against one another and over all broods the sophisticated figure of police lieutenant Ben Sinclair, who, in the words of one of his minions, “don’t like for nobody to try to make a fool of him.” Nobody does. _* Murder Miscellany.—Three recent better-than-average jobs have a Cali- fornia setting. Mary Collins’ Death Warmed Over (Scribner's, $2.50) con- cerns murder in a genteel “guest home” and provides some good dialogue and suspense, while Lenore Glen Offord’s My True Love Lies (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $2.50) gets right downto the problem of who put the corpse—her husband’s, as it turns out—inside the wrappings of an unfinished sculpture by the belle of a San Francisco artists’ colony. M. S. Marble’s Die by Night (Rinehart, $2) is a lively and literate account of the lethal goings-on of the members of a phony Greek cult in Los 2 eeTee ~